A few things off the top of my head:

• I made a particularly tasty shakshuka over the weekend.
• I saw a stoat leading her kits nose to tail, so that they looked like a single, bounding, furry snake as they crossed the track a few days back. I have only seen stoats doing that twice before in my life.
• in Forge of Empires, which I have recently started playing, my defending PvP army successfully defeated a challenger: the first time that has happened, and it left me feeling ridiculously happy.
• Albert Finney and Sean Connery’ interaction in the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express
• My partner’s pleasure at completing a 1940s style knitted top. It has turned out extremely well.

I didn’t use to shave - also seeing it as a chore - but as I aged, I found that the upper edge of my beard was creeping up my cheeks to the point where I was beginning to see the upper edge at the bottom of my vision, which I found weird and disconcerting, so ended up trimming the top edge. That looked weird, and so I progressed and eventually settled on a goatee kinda thing, which I have been told by several people suits me - so I stick with it.

I use a wet shave: soapy water, then a shave gel and then shave with the grain. I have never timed it but it takes around the same length of time overall as cleaning my teeth, I suppose. It is reasonably smooth - but not mega-smooth by any means. I do it each morning.

I’m on holiday for a fortnight now. Away with a group of friends at a chalet that one of them owns. Im overlooking the bay, the sea is beautiful and the weather is fine.

Im quite a bit over 30 - late 50s - and we have been doing this for just over half my life now.

This time, however, one of the friends isn’t here, since he is getting more and more reluctant to leave his house at all and has been since covid. Another isn’t here because he has just been in for an operation to remove a melanoma.

The effects of aging are definitely being quite prominent at the moment.

Oh yes, very much - and not just with movies, but TV, novels, stage performance and the like.

As a kid, it was just the overall visuals and spectacle as much as anything - details of the plot were secondary. Into my teens and early twenties and think that plot details came to dominate and after that exploring interesting concepts began to take priority. Then I guess that I began to appreciate the production side of things more: writing quality and cinematography etc maybe into my 30s and 40s. And these days (in my 50s) I am much more focused on character-driven things.

Fairly standard (for the UK, in the '70s): black trousers, blue or white shirt, dark blue blazer, school tie etc.

BUT, the blazer had the school emblem on, which was derived from the poultry trade that had been a major feature of the town’s prosperity at one time: we all had a large un-ironic turkey embroidered on our chests.

Lucas has said that we wanted it to appeal to 12 year olds - and I was.

Star Wars (A New Hope) - Lucas had a particular age of audience in mind. I was that age when it was released, and he hit the target.

Since the age of 30? Only when on demos/direct actions - or when patrolling the nature reserves where I have worked. In those cases, since I have had NVDA and de-escalation training etc, I have pretty much relied on that: so remain passive, smile, speak, find common ground, use the drama triangle and all the rest.

To be honest, even before the age of 30 (as an adult), as far as I can remember my only real confrontations as such have been in the same or similar situations.

Obviously, I have ended up being dragged off and arrested a few times at the direct actions, and have been hit a couple of times and also deliberately run down by an offroad motorbike on a reserve. On that occasion, I didn’t get much opportunity to ‘confront’ the guy, really though, beyond diverting his attention from my volunteers.

Yes I would - very much in the same situation.

I think that Jaws is a good reference point here.

I’d say that if you genuinely prefer Benchley’s novel to Spielberg’s film then that is a pretty good indicator that you’re just going to prefer books no matter what.

Without looking for sources - so I could be totally wrong - I believe that it did darken proportionately and that light meters would register that. However, human eyes are not light meters and adjust to the dimmer light without you knowing.

Difficult to say. I’ve never been one to fixate on a single film for long. The ones below are likely candidates for various reasons though. I must have seen each at least 6 times. Probably none of them more than a dozen though.

• The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
• Star Wars/A New Hope (1977)
• Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
• Mon Oncle (1958)
• The Ladykillers (1955)
• The Third Man (1949)

Film

• Uproar (2023) - a New Zealand coming of age tale. There are no surprises here. You know exactly what you are getting right from the start, but it is solidly and engagingly done, with some some good performances from Josh Waaka and Rhys Darby particularly.

• House of Flying Daggers (2004) - continuing my SO’s wuxia fad at the moment. This one looks wonderful and has some great set pieces early on but then runs out of ideas and drifts to a stop in a morass of repetitive melodrama and loose ends. Very pretty but frustratingly unsatisfying.

TV

• A Gentleman in Moscow - the pick of the crop at the moment with Ewan McGregor and Alexa Goodall both both proving charming in their respective roles. The tale balences the pre-revolutionry culture, the bolshevic ideals and the grim reality well - although glamourising the former quite a bit, at least initially.

• Renegade Nell - this has a lot of positive reviews, and i certainly enjoyed the writer’s Gentleman Jack, but on the basis of the first episode it seemed to be tonally all over the place, as though the writer had one thing in mind but the director, or studio bosses or someone were trying for something totally different. I found it pretty off-putting and am not sure whether I’ll continue.

• Extraordinary - I thoroughly enjoyed season 1 and am glad to see that season 2 is keeping it up. Some of the novelty value of the superpowers in season 1 has been replaced by more emphasis on the individual characters this time round, but the comedy is definitely still on point.

Does Ivor the Engine count as a cartoon? Animation, certainly, but I’m not sure about ‘cartoon’ as such.

Anyway, it is the 1975 version for me.

I use Rainy Days for the radar, and - since I’m in the UK - the Met Office weather app, which has a Next Rain widget.

I don’t know whether it was you, but I have responded to this same question on Lemmy before.

Yes. We had a coal fire when I was growing up - in the 60s and 70s -, so it was an everyday thing during the winters.

What they found is a mastaba, which were used as tombs - and pretty much for nothing else - for thousands of years in Egypt, in an area that was used for other tombs.

So, this would be like finding an arch shaped stone with a name on and flowers in front in a modern day cemetery. How do you know that it is a grave stone? You don’t, but it would be a pretty good guess, and if you guessed that it was anything else, you’d probably be wrong.

Re-decorated their living rooms, fitted new kitchens, built patios and bbqs and so on.

We were the ones fitting the plexiglass etc.

I was considered an essential worker, along with a few colleagues.

There were three phases: going into it, being in it and coming out of it. During the first and and third of those there was new legislation and instructions coming in pretty much every day that needed to be interpreted and implemented and we had to do all of that. It was exhausting. And then everyone else came back from furlough and told us all about the DIY they had done and the books they had read and so on.

In the middle though: well, I work across a cluster of heritage and wildlife sites. There was a bare minimum of checks and maintenance that we were expected to do - pretty much alone - one at each site. Once that was done we went out and did patrols. They are some beautiful places and there were a few days when I completed the entire circuit of the site and saw absolutely no-one. Just me and the wildlife. That was excellent.

The single biggest thing for me is having a range of knowledgeable and intelligent friends and spending time with them. It very soon puts things in perspective.